what's a good free program to initialize a hard drive and format it. I have stubborn drive in one of my old computers that keeps getting the bad partition table randomly every few weeks for no reason and now windows says the drive needs to be initialized and formatted however it just gives and error and all it tells me to do is check the event log to get the details of the error but there is no entry in the event log regarding the error. I have another drive with windows on it now but would still like to get this other drive working

Bummer but I guess I have my other drive. Before all this started happening the drive showed no problem in HD tune yet is not wanting to stay working. Even now it isn't detecting problems it just won't initialize.

There isn't anything important on that drive just windows 7, some tv shows a few documents all of which are on other computers as well. I might do the g parted thing and try to create a partition. I have never done a full format of the drive after the problems started.